Why We Buy

Martin Lindstrom’s Buy•ology and Paco Underhill’s Why we Buy should be required reading for all business related major students. In Paco Underhill’s book he really digs in to and investigates that will make a person purchase on product from another. Paco Underhill is like the frontline specialist. On the sales floor is where he rules changing and adapting to consumers needs and wants. He is able to tell you why a product in one store is selling but not in another. Or why products that have huge advertisement budget have not really left the shelf. Now where Underhill is on the sales floor in his book, Martin Lindstrom digs into the minds of the consumers in his book Buy•ology. By doing this Lindstrom is able to identify why we purchase the products/services we do.

Now one thing that I really learned in Lindstrom’s book is that we lie. Consumers lie time and time again, not only are we lying to each other or surveys but to are selfs. Either that or we are to scared to tell the truth to anyone. In one of Lindstrom’s studies he was testing a new show for a U.S. audience that was already doing great in the U.K. The show was called Quizmania, to see how the audience was going to react to this show before it was even aired Lindstrom arranged at test of two hundred people. They had three shows for the group of two hundred to watch Quizmania, The Swan, and How Clean Is Your House? Now going into this study Lindstrom already new what people thought of both How Clean Is Your House? and The Swan. This way he would have something to compare the new show too. How Clean Is Your House? was a success with viewers, where as The Swan had not been that popular. If the U.S. was like the U.K. then Quizmania should fall somewhere in between the two other shows. Geting the surveys back from the group of two hundred it seemed that Quizmania was their least favorite show out of everyone in the group. When Lindstrom went and check the SST scans of when they were watching the show, he found that in reality the test showed that like the U.K. the show Quizmania fell in between The Swan and How Clean Is Your House? This just shows that we as consumers are lying more about what we want.

This brings me to a problem that Lindstrom keeps coming up against. The ethics of using neuro - biology in marketing and advertising. If companies are able to know what you want better then yourself then we as consumers going to be defenseless to prevent are selfs from overspending. Right now you see people sending way more then they can afford. Lindstrom thinks that people will moral not do this to consumers and as consumers if we lean the companies tricks to get us to buy then we can notice them and check to see if we really need the product/service. The problem with Lindstrom’s thoughts are. First, people want more, companies are going to always try and get as much out of the consumers they can. Second, most of the consumers are stupid, we are not going